I'm on an honesty kick. I'm busy with work lately, and I've started working out more too, so I don't really have the energy to be fun and entertaining, which is, sometimes, what I imagine blogging is for. Entertaining the masses. Being funny and engaging so that people will like you, you'll be popular, and feel better about yourself. If this is getting to angsty for you, I understand. But sometimes you just have to get your issues out, put them out into internetland where someone might read it and understand and for a moment you might not feel so alone.
My boss asked me today if I thought I deserved success, and I nearly started crying because I didn't want to tell her "no." I almost didn't want to admit it to myself. From a Christian standpoint, we don't deserve anything, but that's another conversation entirely. But everyone should want themselves to do well, to exceed at whatever they've chosen to do with their life. Right?
It's not so much that I believe I deserve to fail, so much as I'm not sure I believe I deserve to succeed. The main problem is that I remember all the bad things I've done, every mistake I've made, everyone I've hurt, every time I made a fool out of myself, and my brain collects them and plays them like a movie reel in my head to make me feel the scum of the earth.
If you're Christian like me, you're going to say to me that no one deserves success, no one deserves anything, which is what makes Grace so powerful. If I actually got what I deserved, my life would be very different.
But this seems a little different. Success is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you're going to fail, then you probably will. If I keep waiting for the bottom to drop out at work, waiting for it to start getting horrible for me again, then it will. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but eventually it will.
So how do I start believing I deserve to succeed at anything? How to I go from a glass-half-empty to a glass-half-full type? At this point it seems like a genuine personality change. I'm mostly faking it right now. I have this struggle between my emotional heart and my logical brain, and I'm at that point where success is the struggle. As long as my logic and my emotions are still at war with each other then I still have a chance, I haven't given up on myself yet. But is this success at all, even a little bit? Or is it just treading water?
I think it also depends on how you define success. Like, success in work - yeah, you can deserve that if you do what you need to in order to get there. Success in faith and salvation - no one deserves it but we get it anyway. And coming from a Christian perspective, what about "I can do all things through Christ?" You might not be the one who does it, but God can through you. When we say "we don't deserve" something, it kinda feels like we're coming from a point beore the cross. It's like Jesus never rose. It's a place of shame. But we aren't in shame anymore because HE DID rise! He gave us victory! We're Easter people. (Taking a cue from your dad.) Do we deserve anything? Nope. But God gives it anyway.
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